Dreamology(68)

Celeste, meanwhile, is fine. Better than fine. She’s already started dating some architecture major at one of the local colleges and is hardly around anymore. But when she is, we are starting to talk again. Still, I would be all alone were it not for Oliver, who is my eternal savior, eating with me in the dining hall, Segwaying next to me as I walk to class. And now that he’s fallen for Sophie, our friendship can proceed without any more complications.

I sigh and put the metal mouthpiece to my lips and inhale. At least one thing in my life isn’t complicated.

“I can’t help but feel you’re dodging my question,” Delilah observes as she watches my long, drawn-out exhalation. And she’s right again.

“I’m fine,” I say.

“You don’t seem fine,” she says. “Have you given any more thought to the questions I asked you at your last visit? How you are choosing to define yourself at this time in your life?”

“I guess I just don’t understand why everyone is so desperate for me to know everything. Who I am, what I want to do. I’m only sixteen. Why should I?” I say. “Since when is a sixteen-year-old supposed to hold the keys to the future?”

“Nobody is asking you to know that,” Delilah says. “All anyone is asking is for you to start trying to figure it out. And there’s nothing very scary about that, is there?” she asks.

“No.” I shake my head. “That actually doesn’t sound very scary at all.” I understand what she means now. We have to try to move forward. Otherwise, how do we expect to get anywhere?

When Max drove off that day, I just stood on the empty sidewalk, watching the lights flash from green to yellow to red and back again, wondering what had happened. How did it all go from wrong to right to worse than it had ever been? How could Max accuse me of not actually loving him, when he’s the only one I ever wanted?

What he doesn’t seem to understand is that it’s not about him. It’s about the dreams. The dreams were what I could count on. Where I could go when nothing else was going right. Back in New York I wasn’t allowed to paint my bedroom a color other than ugly eggshell white, so I hung up twinkle lights. That’s what the dreams did for my life. I covered it in patio lights so none of it seemed as bad. The dreams were where I could always count on being happy . . . where I could always count on him.

Max said I don’t know how to live in reality, and maybe he’s right. Maybe I need to take down the lights and stare the eggshell in the face.

When I walk into the house after school that day, the first thing I see are my father’s legs sticking out from beneath the sofa, as Jerry looks on with a concerned expression. Things keep getting weirder and weirder around this place. Last week when I came home he was rigging a giant basket to a rope that extended all the way to the top of the staircase, so he could hoist Jerry up and down.

“For his knees,” he explained, as though it was perfectly normal, as Jerry stood off to the side, eyeing the contraption warily. “He’s not getting any younger. This way he can go where we go with ease.”

The man needs friends.

“Dad?” I call out now. “Are you okay?”

At the sound of my voice my father wiggles his body backward and pops his head out, clutching Jerry’s tennis ball in one hand.

“He lost it again,” he explains, before handing the ball to a patiently waiting Jerry, who takes it and drops it, bouncing it to himself for a moment before losing it under the sofa again. My father’s shoulders slump. I start tapping my fingers against the side of my leg to a made-up rhythm as I psych myself up for the question I need to ask.

“Hey, Dad, did you happen to hear back from Madeleine as to whether we’ll be seeing her on this trip?”

“Great question,” my dad says, getting back down on the floor and searching under the sofa again. “Not entirely sure on that yet.”

“What does that mean?” I ask.

“I’m just not sure if she’s going to have time between the conference and all the travel,” he starts to ramble, but the end of it gets cut off, muffled by the sofa.

My father, a grown man, is actually hiding from me. I tap my fingers faster. This is harder than I thought it would be.

Let me know when you’re ready to live in the real world, I hear Max say.

Screw it, I think, and I lie down on the ground, too, so both my father and I are on our stomachs with our heads stuck under the sofa. Behind us I hear Jerry make an anxious whinnying noise.

“Alice, what are you doing?” my father asks.

“Dad,” I say. “Look at me. The conference is in five days. Have you heard from Madeleine at all?” I ask. “Did you even reach out to her?”

“I wish you would call her Mom,” he tells me again.

“I would be able to do that if she’d been one,” I say. And he closes his eyes for a moment, as if I have pained him. “Dad,” I say, “Mom left us. She left us for monkeys, and she’s not coming back. We have to accept it, and we have to talk about it.” As I peer at my father in the dim light under the sofa, I consider that perhaps, for us, this is our womb. The place we feel covered enough to share how we really feel. Like a person going into a fetal position, or Jerry taking his treats under the dining room table to eat them in peace.

Eventually, my father nods. “That sounds like an excellent idea, Alice. How about we do it over some cake?”